Emotional Deprivation or Neglect? How to Tell the Difference

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If you are familiar with the field of psychology, perhaps you have heard the story of Genie.

Genie was raised in complete isolation in the 1950s and ’60s. She was emotionally deprived and physically abused by her parents. What she endured as a small child was absolutely devastating and gained lots of attention from the media and psychological researchers.

Genie is an extreme example of emotional deprivation. But the reality is that emotional deprivation is, by its very definition, extreme.

Childhood Emotional Deprivation: This happens when parents exhibit an extreme absence of emotional attention to their child. Emotional deprivation is often, if not usually, accompanied by child physical abuse and is most documented in orphanages or abusive families.

Childhood Emotional Neglect: This happens when parents fail to respond enough to their child’s emotional needs. Unlike emotional deprivation, emotional neglect can be much more subtle. It often happens in non-abusive families. As the absence of something (emotional attention and emotional validation), it is often difficult to spot. A child’s parents may meet many of their needs, like their physical, material, and educational needs, but the child’s emotional needs—like every child’s natural need to be seen, deeply understood, and emotionally validated by their parents—go significantly unacknowledged and unmet.

Once noticed by outsiders, children like Genie can get assistance and resources. Emotionally deprived children can enter the foster care system and may be adopted by loving, emotionally attentive parents. Of course, that is the best-case scenario.

An emotionally neglected child, on the other hand, typically does not get noticed by outsiders. Children who are emotionally neglected tend to go under the radar, unaware that anything is going wrong for them. No one to help… no one to notice, not even themselves.

Emotional deprivation and emotional neglect can play out very differently in a child’s life as they grow older into adulthood.

Emotional Deprivation

Dr. Rene Spitz, an Austrian-American psychoanalyst, highlighted the negative impacts of emotional deprivation by studying infants in Romanian orphanages. What he discovered was devastating but not necessarily surprising: Emotional connection plays a key role in development.

Infants who have been emotionally deprived experience reduced brain volume, high levels of cortisol (a stress hormone that helps your body respond to danger) in their brains, and changes to their prefrontal cortex.

Megan Gunnar, an American psychologist, found that emotionally deprived children can have difficulty with executive functions like their working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, specifically. Many of these children suffer from high anxiety, struggle to regulate their emotions, and lack the ability to understand the mental states of others.

Spitz and Gunnar are just a few of the many researchers who have found evidence to support the notion that emotional deprivation is directly linked to significant changes in children’s brains. On a more hopeful note, studies have also found that the negative effects of emotional deprivation can be restored when children go on to receive love and emotional attentiveness—whether they are adopted by loving families or circumstances in their lives change to support a healthy environment.

Emotional Neglect

After about a decade of working as a psychologist, I began to notice a pattern in the clients I saw. I had clients who would describe clear events that had shaken their lives—abuse, deprivation, or other traumatic events. But the pattern I noticed was actually what didn’t happen in my clients’ lives.

Clients would describe feelings of emptiness, low self-knowledge and emotional awareness, feeling disconnected from themselves and others, a lack of self-compassion, a high sense of independence and responsibility, feelings of shame and self-blame, and difficulty with self-discipline. And these symptoms were perplexing to my clients. They couldn’t understand why they felt this way. Everything in their lives and their upbringing might be seemingly “normal,” yet they feel they are living under a relentless gray cloud.

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The fascinating thing about this pattern of struggles was that so many of my clients showed it despite having very little else in common. They came from all walks of life—different genders, cultures, religions, and backgrounds—yet shared this special group of symptoms. Why would this be so?

It’s due to childhood emotional neglect. Most of these clients who held the core symptoms above didn’t receive enough emotional responsiveness, emotional attention, or emotional validation as they were raised.

Here’s the good news: Childhood emotional neglect can be healed. This is something I discovered by working with these clients in my private practice throughout the years. We worked together to give them what they never received but desperately needed in their childhood homes: emotional acknowledgment. We worked toward understanding and feeling their emotions, fostering emotional connections, and living more emotionally centered in the world.

Emotional Deprivation and Emotional Neglect: Different Experiences With Similar Outcomes

Children being deprived of emotional nurturance during the time they are supposed to be the most joyous, free, and playful is heart-wrenching. It’s easy to imagine orphanages or foster homes in which children are left to their own devices. But emotional deprivation can happen anywhere. Perhaps it even happened to you. It can happen to any child and affect any family. If you are a survivor of emotional deprivation, know you are not alone.

With emotional deprivation on one end of the spectrum, childhood emotional neglect is a little bit closer to the middle. It’s not quite as extreme, but it’s impactful nonetheless. You may have even been raised by loving parents who inadvertently neglected your very important emotional needs. Nonetheless, emotional neglect leaves children, eventually growing into adults, feeling deeply alone in the world.

An Important Takeaway

There is one piece of crucial information that I would like for you to take away after reading this article. The effects of emotional deprivation—children born without love and guidance from their parents—can be reversed. Children who eventually get the emotional care they need from a loving adoptive family can heal.

As a somewhat less extreme experience, childhood emotional neglect can be reversed as well. I have seen it firsthand. It’s done by discovering and listening to your emotional landscape, attending to your emotional needs, and becoming your own emotionally attentive parent.

Emotional deprivation is extreme yet visible. Emotional neglect can be very subtle and invisible. It’s my life mission to make childhood emotional neglect more well-known. I want every therapist to know about it, be able to spot it, and have the skills to guide their clients toward a place of healing. In fact, I want every person to have what they need to identify the effects of childhood emotional neglect and heal.

If we know that children who come from devastating environments of emotional deprivation can heal, those who have been emotionally neglected can heal, too.

Childhood emotional deprivation and childhood emotional neglect are not the same, but they are not that different either. No matter how visible or invisible your emotional treatment was as a child, you deserve to have your emotional needs met today.

© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.